In any field of study, teaching and learning go hand in hand with testing. In foreign language teaching, the testing of skills development has become a specialized area requiring the combined efforts of linguists, psychologists, statisticians, and educators. Teachers must constantly ask: What kind of progress are my students making in this second…

Various manners of presenting two vocabularies were compared in terms of rate of learning and amount of immediate and delayed retention. Four concurrent and two consecutive conditions were used, each comprising two sets of symbols (nonsense syllables distinguished by a color cue) associated with a common set of referents (nonsense forms). Twenty…

Fifty-four native American children, 62 Spanish-speaking children, and 36 Black children (all from kindergarten through fourth grade) were given the Utah Test of Language Development (UTLD). (SBH)

To ensure reliable language data for research there is a need for experiments eliciting acceptability judgments. Experimental data are discussed to show that evaluation of a sentence may be affected by the sentence with which it is paired. Sentences with similar deviances should be presented as a set for evaluation. (CHK)

Describes a study of three high/intermediate English as a second language students whose reading comprehension abilities were tested both by verbal interaction between teacher and student and by a multiple-choice fill-in-the-blanks test. Results show that there is a difference between what the text says and what the student understands. (SED)

Foreign-language examinations do not adequately or reliably assess level of skill. Standards and criteria for determining a student's skill level should be improved to provide more guidance and make more appropriate placements in foreign-language classrooms. (CB)

Three methods for evaluating change in the spontaneous language of aphasic subjects were compared. Clinical judgments of experienced speech language pathologists showed excellent agreement with the Shewan Spontaneous Language Analysis (SSLA) and less agreement with the Western Aphasia Battery. The SSLA was found to provide the most comprehensive…

Describes a study that provides further evidence for differentiating between memory for meaningful and for nonmeaningful material in the context of language proficiency, suggesting that foreign language teachers with a good memory have no guarantee of proficiency in language learning. (CB)

The Reporter's Test (DeRenzi and Ferrari, 1978), which investigates the expressive abilities of aphasics, is proven to be useful, through its use in two studies of features of Welsh, for sociolinguists studying language features. The test has great capacity for predicting syntactic forms and eliciting casual styles of speech. (Author/CB)

The Test of Adolescent Language (TOAL) was administered to 7 educable retarded, 23 learning disabled, and 24 possibly gifted adolescents. With 57 percent of the EMR and 27 percent of the LD scoring below the test floor, results suggested that TOAL is not valid for assessing low language levels. (Author/DB)

An examination of concerns about and suggestions for revising the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Oral Proficiency Guidelines indicates that confirmatory empirical research and determination of the relative absence or presence of components are needed. (CB)

Describes the use of an exercise to assess overall language proficiency for placement purposes. The "information gap" test is based on a gapped text which the candidate must complete by asking the tester appropriate questions and writing down the answers. Test rankings have been found to correlate highly with teachers' rankings. (SED)

Discusses a method of measuring oral proficiency in a foreign language called semi-direct testing which elicits active speech by the examinee through means such as tape recordings, printed test booklets, or other methods rather than face-to-face interviews. Describes a study comparing scores of semi-direct and direct tests of German and Spanish.…

Hearing-impaired students (N=508) were administered a language-arts achievement test containing 25 items drawn from a computerized item bank developed with hearing students. Results showed that the items did not form an adequate Rasch-based test. Furthermore, the difficulty order of the items differed in the hearing and hearing-impaired…

Discusses a way of evaluating communicative performance in a second language that focuses on communicative strategies instead of intelligibility, correctness, or style. Describes a study in which an attempt was made to assess communicative performance from this point of view. (EKN)